Odilon Redon (Art Painting eBook)

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BY JEAN SELZ

OMLON «et)ON

The Q.L.P. Art Series

ODILON REDONby Jean Selz

Among all the artists that stud the history

of 19th and 20th century painting, the work of

Odilon Redon is the most singular and least

explored of his time. Painter of a world in

which the elements of tangible reality and the

phantasms of the imagination intermingle, he

has created a veritable esthetic of the unfixed

boundaries of man's perceptions, and, as such,

he stands as a precursor to Surrealism. He has

followed - outside any school and untouched by

any influence - a road in which each step

reveals his love of nature and his need for

dream ; a road which — through the detour of a

private and mysterious mythology — reaches its

culmination in an evocation of the marvelous.

Though he is best known for his pastels — the

bouquets of flowers that haunted his vision

during more than fifty works - and for the

lithographs in which he evoked the fantastical

themes of Edgar Allan Poe or those of the

Apocalypse, his landscapes, portrais, and char-

coal drawings that show him to be a master

of black and white are less familiar. These are

the several aspects of a body of work that, in

its diversity, is always marked by finely wrought

personal delicacy and expressive force; a body

of work that Jean Selz illuminates in this book.

Selz, a critic and art historian, is the author,

in this same series, of works on Vlaminck and

Matisse, and his books on the sculpture and

drawing of the 19 th century have done muchto throw light on our knowledge of the art of

this period. In this work on Redon, Selz shows

that the great modesty of the man masked an

audacious creator whose freedom of spirit sets

an example for us to follow today.

52 reproductions in color: oils, pastels — 23 re-

productions in two tones: charcoal, lithograph.

Illustration on the Front Cover:

Woman amid Flowers (detail), 1909-1910

Pastel, 26" X 22"

Mrs. H . Harris Jonas Collection, New York

Illustration on the Back Cover:

Red Boat with Blue Sail, about 1912

Oil, 21/2" X 29"

L. Jdggli-Hahnloser Collection, Winterthur,

Switzerland

CROWN PUBLISHERS, Inc.419 Park Avenue South, New York, N. Y. 10016

ODILON HEDON

OMLON «et>ON

by Jean Selz

CROWN PUBLISHERS, INC. - NEW YORK

Title page : Portrait of Odilon Redon by Vuillard (detail)

1901 Oil, 13" X 103^" Ari Redon Collection, Paris

Translated jiom the French by.

Eileen H. Hknnkssv

Library of Congress Catalog Card NuiyfftER : 73-147349

Printed in Italy - © 1971 by Ufficipress, S.A. LuganoAll Rights in thf, U.S.A. are reserved by Crown Publishers Inc., New York, N.Y

Breton Port, 1879 or 1883 Oil, 8" X 12 /a" Ari Redon Collection, Paris

o f all the painters whose secrets are known to us, Odilon Redon wasthe one who experienced the greatest difficulty - or used the greatest discretion

- in explaining his painting. However, he formulated a lucid definition of his art

by saying that it consisted of putting « the logic of the visible at the service of the

invisible. » His work does in fact occupy a place between sight and vision. Redon,

as much a narrator of the imagination as an observer of nature, shuttled from

one to the other with a steadfast desire to avoid breaking the bond that in his

eyes made them inseparable. But his activity was not always carried on exactly

in accordance with his definition : we could reverse the terms and say that he

also placed the resources of the invisible at the service of the visible. This dual

orientation of his mind, this movement back and forth over the same path

between the real and the unreal, explain that which constitutes at once the unity

and the diversity of his output. After half a century, his work, which is sincere

and exceptional - two words which cannot be dissociated in speaking of Redon -

retains its power to rivet our gaze and arouse our curiosity.

A solitary apprenticeship

The road that led Redon to the threshold of what he himself modestly

called « a small door opened onto the mystery » first crosses a half-savage land-

scape whose ancient trees, stones, and brambles, under the harsh sun or the abun-

dant rains, were a source of unforgettable delights. This landscape surrounded

the house at Peyrelebade, in the Medoc, where he spent his childhood, and which

he very often mentioned in his writings with a fei'vor which never diminished. Its

influence on the formation of his character and his mind was a continuation of

the one later exerted on him by museums and books. For in the work of painters

and poets he was first to seek the renewal of the emotions which a long intimacy

with the scenes of nature, and the discovery of what nature contains in the wayof the wondrous and the fantastic, had led him to experience. He was so fascinated

by it that he was able to write in his Notes (published posthumously in a volume

entitled A Soi-meme ) : « My aptitude for contemplation made mj^ search for a

personal way of seeing things painful.

»

Several factors in these years of Redon's youth - factors whose impor-

tance should be neither exaggerated nor belittled - are noteworthy. In particular,

they seem like signs that help to make the progress of his destiny more intelli-

gible to us.

For a child like Odilon Redon, timid, quiet, of almost morbid sensitivity,

inclined to dreaminess and anxiety, the very attraction of that which was capable

of disturbing him seems as it were a power of vertigo to which he surrendered

with an anguished sensation of pleasure. «As a child I sought out the shadows,

»

he was later to write. « I remember taking a deep and unusual joy in hiding

under the big curtains and in the dark corners of the house. » It was here in

the old manor house at Peyrelebade that he was to produce all his noirs, his

« black pictures, » as he called the more than five hundred charcoal drawings

he left, and which constitute a major portion of his work.

For such a child, drawing was already a refuge in which his revulsion

for all that was violent could be gratified. It was the act by which he took full

possession of his solitude - the second act, after that of contemplation. It is not

surprising that, in 1851, at the age of eleven, he received a prize for drawing.

Four years earlier he had spent some time in Paris, and from this visit he

retained the memor}' of his first visits to the museums. « An impression of the

Flight, around 1865 India-ink wash, liy^" X 18"

Kroiler-Moiler Rijksmuseum, Otterloo, The Netherlands

paintings of dramatic scenes has remained in my memory. My eyes are full

of nothing but depictions of violent life, of an excess of life; that was the only

thing which struck me. »

Around the age of fifteen he had a drawing teacher, a pupil of Isabey

named Stanislas Gorin, whose studio, in the middle of a garden with an abun-

dance of flowers, was located in a suburb of Bordeaux. In Redon's own words,

he was a « distinguished painter of watercolors » but, he adds, « romantic and

enthusiastic » as well, and he seems to have been an excellent teacher for

Redon, being careful to develop his pupil's sensitivity of observation and to

respect his personal inclinations. Young Redon was beginning to become in-

terested in the Bordeaux Museum and in the major exhibitions being held at

that time in the city. Among the painters who were to attract his attention to

the greatest degree, three names appear to us to be particularly significant

:

those of Delacroix, Corot, and Gustave Moreau.

Redon made copies of Delacroix's works, and his admiration for that

artist was to appear frequently in his writings and sometimes in his work. In

1878 he analyzed several canvases of the painter to whom, by his own admis-

sion, he owed his « first awakening » and the permanence of his «own flame.

»

His favorite was the Chariot of Apollo, a theme which he himself was to depict

several times in a very personal manner after abandoning his noirs for color.

What he says of Delacroix's composition could accurately be applied to his

own : « It is the triumph of light over the shadows, the joy of broad daylight

opposed to the sorrows of the night and the shadows. » It would also be pos-

sible to see in this remark a premonitory insight into the development of his

own work.

He was to become acquainted with Corot, and was never to forget a

remark by that artist which corresponded so well to the ambiguities of his

own art : « Next to an uncertainty, place a certainty. » Corot's influence was

to be seen in the treatment and tonality of his early landscapes.

As for Gustave Moreau, Redon praised him, but valued his watercolors

above all -which is indicative of a sound judgment on this painter. We shall

later investigate to what extent Redon's painting sometimes closely resembled,

and especially how it differed from, Moreau's work.

When we reflect on what Redon's vision was later to be, and on those

magical bouquets in which he seems to have been possessed by the secret of

the fascination of each individual flower, his first youthful friendship, the

one that linked him with the botanist Armand Clavaud, appears to be of ma-

jor importance. Such meetings are worthy of greater attention than certain facts

of a professional nature which nourish the biography of an artist without shed-

ding light on those mysterious paths by which, unknown to him, he advances

toward the suddenly decisive stage of his development. We can therefore re-

frain from lingering over Redon's attempts to join the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,

his failure in the entrance examination, and his brief and for him so-disap-

pointing sojourn in Gerome's studio, noting only the young artist's basic hos-

tility to all official instruction.

Armand Clavaud was carrying on work in plant physiology, and was in-

terested in the most minuscule plants and in that intermediate and disquieting

life between the animal nature and the plant. Redon seems to have later illus-

trated and transfigured this preoccupation in the composition of certain works

in which there unfolds a kind of dreamof vegetation animated by an ambiguous

life. Clavaud possessed an extremely broad culture, and his passion for literature

was contagious. It was through him that Redon learned of Flaubert, Baude-

Rose in a Vase, 1865-1867 Oil, 18" X 13/2" Musee des Beaux-Arts, Algiers

Portrait

OF MadameRedon, 1882

Oil,

173/4" X 14/2"

Musecdu Louvre.

Paris

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Self-Portrait,

around 1880

Oil,

18" X 13/2"

All RedonCollection. Paris

10

The Cliffs at Valieres, 1900 Oil, IP/2" X I73/4'

Ari Redon Collection, Paris

12

laire, and Edgar Allan Poe, all three of whom were later to serve as the inspi-

ration for some admirable lithographs.

Another very important encounter for Redon was his meeting with RodolpheBresdin, who initiated him into engraving and lithographic work. He made his

acquaintance around 1863 in Bordeaux, where the prodigious engraver, w^hose

work was to remain for so long misunderstood, was living in extreme misery.

For the first time Redon saw an artist place the resources of a very confident

technique at the service of an imagination fertile in dreams and delirium. Bres-

din never worked from nature. He knew how to look at it, however, and in

his fantastic landscapes, in which the vegetation was depicted with an abundance

of inextricable details (« detailed to the point of madness, » in the words of

Theodore de Banville), and in which, again, a certain ambiguity sometimes

reigned over apparitions that were more or less human or animal, myster\^ and

drama took on the accent of a deeply felt tiTith.

In such works, that which Redon dimly perceived concerning an art

sufficiently free to lead nature beyond her tangible reality, and which he had

not 3'et dared to express himself, seemed to be a confirmation of his determina-

tion to follow the road he was to take. Redon signed The Ford, one of the first

etchings he did in 1865, « pupil of Bresdin, » and the homage he paid the

latter almost a half-century later, in the course of a lecture given in Holland,

proves that he had always retained a faithful gratitude and fer\^ent admiration

for his master.

A universe in black and white

It was around 1862 that Odilon Redon began to paint. Still extant are

Flowers ( 1865), a Self-portrait ( 1867), and a few slightly later studies of Medoc

landscapes. But these were only the timid first stages in an apprenticeship the

necessity of which was not to force itself upon him until much later. At this

time color did not in tnith appear to him to be a satisfactoiy means of express-

ing what he had to say. His vision of the world acquired the plenitude of its

mysterious power only when cloaked in those twilight shadows evoked by black

and white. This is why, for him, unlike many other painters, drawing was not

a mere exercise of observation or the temporary symbol to which the pre-

meditated work is reduced. For more than thirty years, drawing was to represent

for Redon the principal achievement of his creative power.

In his early charcoal drawings, a somewhat romantic atmosphere envelops

the landscapes and continues to betoken the influence of Corot. Soon, however,

his compositions take on a more serious note, and gradually they are oriented

toward scenes into which there creeps an unobtmsive strangeness resulting

1.3

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14 The Gnome, around 1875 Charcoal, 18" X MY^Art Institute of Chicago

A Mask Tolls the Knell, 1882 Lithograph (« To Edgar Poe »), lOy^" X 7/2'

National Library, Print Room, Paris

15

Closed

15

Eyes,

1890

Oil,

X 113/4"

Museedu Louvre,

Paris

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Self-Portrait,

around 1888Charcoal,

ISYi" X 9"

Collection J.E.

van der Meulen,The Hague

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IBuddha,undated

Pastel,

35/2" X 29"

Private

Collection,

Paris

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Portrait

OF MadameRedonEmbroidering,

1880

Pastel,

20" X 14"

Ari RedonCollection, Paris

18

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Meditation. 1893 Pastel, 8" X 6/2" Gallery- La Boetie, Serger Collection, New York

more from the way the plays of shadow and Hght are organized than from the

subjects depicted. In this period Redon uses chiaroscuro as an essential methodof expression. A remark by him stresses its importance in his work : « I insist

on the fact that my entire art is limited solely to the resources of chiaroscuro,

and it also owes a great deal to the effects of abstract line, that power drawnfrom deep sources which acts directly upon the mind. » We shall later see howRedon was to utilize this « power drawn from deep sources » not only in his

drawings but also in his painting.

However, his charcoal drawings were to find the principal nourishmentfor their subjects in a fantastic world which he was to depict with the lucidity

of a visionary, paying to the phantasms of his imagination the same scrupulous

attention he would have paid them had they been real phenomena that hadappeared before him, and drawing them with the same precision he used in

drawing a face or a tree. This permitted him to state that « I cannot be denied

the credit of giving life to my most unreal creations. » These creations wereoften monsters. But what Redon was seeking, and what strikes us in these

unusual apparitions, is, above and beyond the terrifying aspect of these Cyclopes

and chimeras and the Spider with the human smile, the shadowy universe to

which they seem to belong and with which we suddenly feel ourselves in com-munication, as if it were the projection before our eyes of our own most an-

guished dreams. Redon never sought to astonish us, but he had the gift of

sweeping us, with a gentleness made spellbinding by the velvety substance of

the charcoal, into the depths of a revery in which the most mythical scenes

became perceptible and familiar to us. Such was the power which he himself

admitted he possessed (without explaining it) when he said that his entire

originality consisted « in causing improbable beings to live in human fashion

according to the laws of the probable. »

It has been possible to see in Redon, not incorrectly, a precursor of

Surrealism, for certain of his drawings are composed of an unexpected meet-

ing of elements that express the freedom of spirit with which he juxtaposed

the objects of real life and those of the dream life on the paper. In Eye with

poppy, for example, a large, carefully drawn eye, surmounted by a poppy close

to a leaf or a feather which has loomed up in space, stands out against a rec-

tangle of light that evokes a sky seen in the frame of a window. Elsewhere,

human heads take wing among the clouds. But even when the exceptional is

less obviously presented, something in Redon's compositions always rivets our

attention by its character of enigmatic gravity. Woman seen in profile, whose

face is turned toward strange forms that are only just floral (they belong, in

truth, to the pure domain of abstraction), seems to be tinged by a disquiet

that turns our contemplation into an inquir3^ Thus a question is always raised

in Redon's works, and we should be careful not to seek an answer. While he

21

The Eye, a Strange Balloon, Moves Toward the Infinite, 1882 Lithograph f« Tn Kdgar Poe »),

lOy^" X 7Y4" Collection Galerie Le Bateau-Lavoir. Paris

The Raven, 1882 Charcoal, 153/^" X 11" National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

narrowly opens a door onto the mystery, he nevertheless does not give us the

power to enter it.

Redon continued the exploration of this « obscure world of the indeter-

minate » - for which he hoped, he says, « to produce in the spectator a kind of

diffuse and dominant attraction » - in his lithographs, at first out of a simple

desire to multiply his charcoal drawings, as was the case with his first series

of plates, In the dream, published in 1879, and then out of enthusiasm for a

technique in which he was constantly discovering new resources that served

to enrich his black-and-white work. « All my plates, from first to last, have

been simply the fruit of an inquisitive, attentive, anxious, and passionate anal-

ysis of that which the lithograph crayon, assisted by the paper and the stone,

contained in the way of power of expression. »

The choice of themes treated in his lithographic series is clearly signi-

ficative of the spirit climate in which the artist was developing his work. In

1882 he dedicated an album of six plates « To Edgar Poe. » We should not try

to find in them an illustration of texts by the American writer; the are merely

representative of a state of mind that harmonizes with the poet's penchant

for the extraordinary. An example is the composition entitled The eye, like a

strange balloon, moves toward the Infinite. Eyes always held a special fascina-

tion for Redon, whether by their gaze, in which scarcely the secret of a thought

is revealed, or by the still more secret thought they conceal beneath their

lowered lids. Several of his drawings and canvases bear the title The closed

eyes, and he frequently presents the faces of his Ophelias, Eves, Orpheuses,

Christs, and Virgins with closed eyes, a world asleep or enveloped in a solitude

in which, it seems, he wished merely to suggest the interior presence of a dream.

In The origins, a series of eight lithographs published in 1883, an eye,

inscribed in a question mark, is again the subject of a plate entitled There was

perhaps a preliminary vision tested in the flower. The ambiguity of the plant

kingdom formulated here reappears in the Homage to Goya, published in 1885;

one of its six plates bears the notation The marsh flower, a sad and humanhead. In his other collections of lithographs - T/ze night (1886), Dreams (which

he dedicated in 1891 to the memory of his friend Armand Clavaud), and the

three series of The temptation of Saint Anthony, published between 1888 and

1896 -a disturbing fauna stands side by side with an anxious humanity, wan-

dering in a sublunar world over which the shadow of death persistently hovers.

Redon had settled in Paris after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in the

battles of which he participated. Ever>' summer, however, he returned to Peyre-

lebade, where the atmosphere, the silence, and the memories of his unsociable

childhood put him in a frame of mind so favorable to his work that no other

place succeeded in arousing in him the feeling of the need to draw. He had need

of this solitude, in which he could feel he was living « in a secret depth. »

24

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Several submissions to the Society of Friends of the Arts of Bordeauxhad been his only attempts to make himself known prior to 1881, when he exhi-

bited his charcoal drawings for the first time in Paris, in an exhibition organized

in the editorial offices of La Vie Moderne. It went almost unnoticed. Huysmanssaid a few words about it in an article, comparing Redon with Gustave Moreauand confining himself to a definition of his work in a formula that was too

narrow to carry the weight of a judgment : « It is a nightmare carried over

into art. » The fact is that no one had perceived, behind the unusual nature of

the subjects, the admirable work of the draftsman, nor by what sobriety of

method he achieved such a great expressive power. But Huysmans retained such

a strong impression of his work that he selected some charcoal drawings by

Redon to decorate the walls of the home of Des Esseintes, the neurotic hero

of his A' rehours, published three years later. It can be said that he thereby paid

the artist a tribute, even if he gave a description of his charcoal drawings exces-

sively dramatized by the desire to stress their fantastic and frenzied aspect.

But at the same time he distorted their character by forcibly enrolling Redon in

the ranks of Symbolism and in according to him the dubious admiration of Des

Esseintes, whose tastes similarly led him to venerate the work of Gustave

Moreau.

This was an explanation which unfailingly influenced the judgment of

Redon's contemporaries and warped it by placing his art under the dominance of

a literature which thus appeared to have played a much more important role

in his work than was actually the case. There is no disputing the fact that a

relationship can be observed between certain compositions by Redon and those

of Gustave Moreau. But though both artists sometimes felt a preference for the

same themes, Redon never permitted himself to be seduced by that esthetics of

the oriental tale, that baroque mythology, and those ornamental refinements

into which Gustave Moreau had ventured. Moreau never succeeded in introducing

into his works an idea of mystery other than in a theatrical form ; he never

achieved that poetic depth into which Redon had the gift of leading us, and

which came not from a display of symbols and allegories but very simply from

a manner of seeing and of expressing himself.

Moreover, Redon always denied that he had developed his works with

literary, mystical, or metaphysical intentions. Yet he could not be satisfied

with the mere depiction of external objects. He could have adopted for his

own Hegel's observation that « the chief determinant of the content of painting

is that of subjectivity in itself ». This corresponded closely to the thought he

himself expressed in prophetic fashion when he noted in his Journal that « the

future belongs to the subjective world. » This explains the criticisms he had for-

mulated with regard to the Impressionists. In his eyes they did not sufficiently

take into consideration that which was essential for him, namely, « everything

26

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The Shulamite, 1897 Lithograph, 93/4" X 7/2" Private Collection, Paris

The Red Bush, 1901 Oil, 2l3/i" X 18' Private Collection. Paris

that surpasses, illuminates, or amplifies the object, and elevates the mind into

the region of the mystery, the anxiety of the unresolved. . . ., all that our art con-

tains in the way of the unexpected, the vague and the undefinable, and that

gives it an appearance which verges on the enigma. ...»

At that time it was not easy to win public acceptance for a conception that

was opposed both to the academicism of the Salons (where Redon's submissions

were refused) and to forms of expression which, like Impressionism, werethemselves opposed, in a different way, to this academicism. However, this wonhim the friendship of a small group of writers and artists — notably Mallarme,

and, later, Bonnard, Vuillard, and Maurice Denis — who very quickly recog-

nized the worth of his personality. The independence of his position, which kept

him outside all the esthetic movements of his time, ultimately led him to found,

in 1884, the Salon des Independants, of which he was the first president.

Discovery of color

The diligent pursuit of his black-and-white work (charcoal drawings,

lithographs, more rarely etchings, and numerous drawings in plumbago and India

ink) was not to divert Redon completely from his pictorial studies. But the

original work by which he established himself as a great painter was not achieved

until after the closing years of the century', when he was already over fifty

years of age.

The differences between the early landscapes of the Peyrelebade region and

canvases executed some fifteen years later (i.e., around 1880), for example, the

Port in Brittany, are not very pronounced, although the painter had acquired

a more confident technique and his palette had become more varied and moresensitive. But it continued to be subdued and, as it were, confined to a tonality

which would not by its brilliance repudiate his preference for the gray harmo-

nies of charcoal. This is the case with his first pastel, Portrait of MadameRedon embroidering, which dates from 1880, the year of his marriage. The beau-

tiful bent head, seen in profile, barely emerges from the shadow in which the

hair and the dress blend into a single dark color, the lighting of the face occu-

pying just enough space to illuminate its expression of gentle gravity.

By virtue of its substance, very similar to that of charcoal, the pastel was

for Redon, at this period, certainly an intermediate stage between drawing and

painting. Above all, he was to find in it, without deviating from a technique that

was familiar to him, the encouragement to overcome the distrust that color still

seemed to arouse in him. Nevertheless, he did not immediately utilize it for

the mysterious, personal themes that made the originality of his drawings so

engaging.

29

Martyr's Head, around 1894 Charcoal, My^' X 14y^"

Kroiler-Moiler Rijksmuseum, Otterloo, The Netherlands

^ The Smiling Spider, 1881 Charcoal, lOy^' X ISyz"

Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, Paris

31

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Madness, 1877 Charcoal, I4y^" X /2|4" Claude Roger-Marx Collection, Paris

32

Intuition (or Mephisto) , 1877 Charcoal, /5/2 X ISy^" Private Collection, Sivitzerland

33

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There Was Perhaps a Preliminary Vision Tested

in the Flower, 1883

Lithograph f« Les Origines »), Wy^" X 7%"National Library, Print Room, Paris

Flower with a Child's Head, around 1885

Charcoal, /53/4" X /23/4"

Art Institute of Chicago

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Suit of Armor, 1891 Charcoal, 20" X /4J4 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Wall Opens and a Death's Head Appears, 1887

Lithograph (« The Juror ») 9^" X 7" Art Institute of Chicago 37

Profile of Light, 1881-1886 Charcoal, 15" X 11" Private Collection, Paris

\

Eye with Poppy, 1892 Charcoal^ 18" X 72/2 " Claude Roger-Marx Collection, Paris

In 1886, the same year in which his participation in the exhibition of the

Salon des XX in Brussels won him the admiration of the entire artistic and

literary avant-garde of Belgium, we find Redon appearing in the eighth Salon

des Impressionnistes. This may seem surprising, when we know that he did

not admit to any esthetic fellowship with the painters of this school. But wemust take into consideration the fact that in 1886 the last exhibition of the group

no longer presented any significant cohesion. Monet and Renoir had refrained

from participating, and while Sisley and Pissarro were still with the group, paint-

ers of such differing tendencies as Degas, Gauguin, and Forain were also to be

seen, as were Seurat and Signac, both of whom, like Redon, exhibited there for

the first time. Odilon Redon was in truth to take a path clearly opposed to Impres-

sionism, and was to accomplish the work which was gradually, with that

slowness imposed on all true creators, to ensure his fame.

One of the first canvases in which there appears, still quite subdued but

in an already impressive manner, that indefinable character of strangeness which

Redon had ultimately carried over from his charcoal drawings into his painting

is The Arab musician (usually called, incorrectly. The Arab with the guitar),

which dates from 1893 and which hangs in the Petit Palais. In the center of

the picture, a small, bright red figure playing an instrument which is not a

guitar stands out against a background that represents no definite place ; it can

only be described as a surface with partial impastos in which the strokes of

color are laid on according to a technique that today would be called tachist.

On this canvas, evocative of a strange blend of Delacroix and Monticelli, there

is thus nothing but this figure lost in the purely abstract world of the disap-

pearance of objects. The singularity of such a composition resides precisely in

the inexplicable (at least at first) relationship between the red Arab and the

intangibility of that which surrounds him, a relationship very representative

of the ambiguity of spaces which will be found so frequently in Redon's vision.

But what we call « vision » in a painter is also a technical particularity,

since the « way of seeing » exists only insofar as it becomes discernible in a

« way of painting. » This is very striking in the backgrounds conceived by Redon

:

he found the means to make us see something without showing us anything. Hewas able to bring to his brushstrokes of paint an idea of the « possible » that

intrigues our way of seeing. Our eyes seek to clarify the nature of this space

which evades our grasp — a desert-like stretch, the surface of an ocean, a sky

veiled with clouds? — and which appears to us in turn near and far, solid

and imponderable, as fleeting as a thought or a mirage, and always infinite.

Every object placed in contact with this uncertain space then becomes itself an

object of uncertainty. A figure, a face, a bouquet are shown to us only in the

instant of an ephemeral apparition, outside of time, and we expect to see them

suddenly disappear.

40

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Homage to Gauguin, 1904 Pastel, 24/2" X 20" Private Collection, Paris

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The House at Pevrelebade, 1895-1897

Oil, 14" X 17" An Redon Collection, Paris

^ The Arab Musician, 1893^ Oil, 20" X 17/4" Petit Palais, Paris

43

The Lemon and the Pepper, 1901 Oil. 10" X 19'

Mrs. Bonger, Collection, Almen, The Netherlands

The Cyclops, 1898 Oil. 25" X 20"

Kroller-Moller Rijksmuseum, Otterloo, The Netherlands[>

44

Thf. Green Death, 1905-1910 Oil, 22^" X 19" Mrs Bertram Smith Collection, New York

Man with Serpent, around 1907 Oil Private Collection

Portrait

OF Ari

AS A Child,

1894

Oil15" X 12"

Ari RedonCollection,

Paris

<1

PORTR-MT

OF Ari, 1897

Pastel,

18" X 12/2"

Art Institute

of Chicasro

50 Portrait of Madame Redon with a Yellow Scarf, around 1890 Pastel, 26" X 20

'

Kroller-Moller Rijksmuseum, Otterloo, The Netherlands

Portrait of Marie Botkin^ 1900 Red chalk, charcoal and pastel, 25" X 19"

Ari Redon Collection, Paris51

.•-^|K;;«i:-w»s«t-'s^^p^ 2^^r^.-

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^ ^'^^.^;f^^'^'<WM|HH

Wl^f^^^^^!^^^ '"

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The Flight into Egypt, around 1902 Pastel and gouache, 20" X 24"

Private Collection. New York

^ The Sacred Heart, around 1895 Pastel, 23/2" X 17%"Musee du Louvre, Paris

53

Orpheus, after 1903 Pastel, 27/2" X 22^" Cleveland Museum of Art

Je.^nne Chaine, 1903 Pastel, 311/4" X 21 Y^" Basel Museum

Roger and Angelique, around 1910 Pastel 35^" X 28" Museum of Modern Art. New York

For Redon, pastel became in turn, around 1895, a freer and more power-

ful method of expression, in which the figures escaped from the somber universe

of his drawings suddenly appear in bright light with their burden of fatality

and tragedy. There is, for example, the Veiled woman in the Kroller-Muller

Rijksmuseum, which is handled with very great economy of means, and which

seems halfway between disdain and bitterness.

Redon was henceforth in possession of a new power he had discovered

in color. He was undoubtedly quite conscious of it when he suddenly and com-

pletely gave up his noirs in 1897, after the sale — so painful for him — of the

old family home at Peyrelebade. The end of the estate coincides with the end of

a period of his life as well as a period of his art. A new Redon was coming to

birth. This new Redon, a colorist enamored of light, seeking to express a certain

height of happiness by the depiction of themes he had never attempted and by

harmonies of tints whose freshness and brilliance are for him a kind of discovery

of himself, was to be the painter of the enchanted bouquets, of the Chariot of

Apollo and the Birth of Venus. The eyes plunged for so long into the uncertainties

of the night were now opening on other uncertainties — for light itself possessed

its own mysterious charms for Redon — but they had lost their threatening

powers in the warmth of the sun.

One of the themes that was to reappear frequently in his painting after 1900

is that of the Red boat. One of his first canvases bearing this title is also one of

Redon's largest paintings (35 inches by 51^ inches). It is distinguished from those

which were to be painted at a later date by a darker coloration. The red of the

boat gradually takes on the character of a genuine incandescence that extends to

the figures on board, as in the Red boat in the collection of Mme. Jaggli-Hahn-

loser. Between the sea, almost flowery, like a field in spring, and the sky, in

which pink and gold clouds diffuse their cheerful light, the brilliant red of the

boat, made to seem even more intense by the blue of the sails, is the unusual

and disturbing typically Redonesque element that carries this entire seascape

into a semi-imaginary domain. This was always to be the case in Redon's can-

vases. A detail, a color, a flash suffice to challenge a portion of nature's material

reality. It appears, as it were, through that « invisible wall » which, according to

Schelling, separates « the real world from the ideal world. » Here the painter

joins the philosopher when he himself writes that the artist should have his eyes

open « to the two worlds of life, to two realities which it is impossible to

separate. »

Faithful to this esthetics of ambiguity, Redon, just as he leads nature

to the border between the real and the unreal, introduces into his mythical evo-

cations the realistic detail by which myth preserves a link with terrestrial man-

ifestations. Venus, Andromeda, Orpheus, and Apollo appear in mythical land-

57

58 The Gambler, 1879 Lithograph (« In the Dream »), lOYi" X 73^4'


The Prisoner, before 1897 Charcoal, Private Collection 59

Horse, around 1883 Charcoal, 76/2" X /J'/j'

Jacques Dubourg Collection, Paris

60

Phaethon's Chariot, around 1900 Pastel, 19" X 22^"Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

61

The Dream, around 1904 Oil, 22^" X 17" Private Collection, Fribourg, Switzerland

The Red Sphinx, 1910-1912 Oil, 24" X 19 /a" Professor Hans R. Hahnloser Collection, Bern

64Flowers on Blank Ground, 1905 Pastel, 15J4" X I2/2" Private Collection, Paris

\*f'

Portrait of Pierre Bonnard, 1902 Lithograph, 5y^" X 4%'

National Library, Print Room, Paris6.5

The Reader (portrait of Bresdin), 1892 Lithograph, 72^4" X 9|i4"


The Torch, around 1880 Charcoal /2%" X liy^" Stephen Higgins Collection, Paris

67

scapes without any loss of the human quaUty of their happiness or unhappiness. In

the very beautiful pastel Orpheus in the Cleveland Museum, Orpheus (a theme

very often chosen by Redon) sleeps a mortal sleep on the side of a mountain

that seems to welcome him with all the power of Earth. He is watched over by

humble flowers under a sky barely darkened by violet shadows, while fawn-col-

ored flashes bathe the strange composition in a kind of comforting warmth.

In the late work of this painter, who seemed to discover the joy of living

on the threshold of old age, all sadness is thus transcended by a secret hope.

And when it is pure joy that he is painting, as in the dazzling Birth of Venus

in the Petit Palais, in which the shell actually seems to have become flesh (both

are painted in the same ocher tone), a great festival of colors comes to life

under the blue sky in a rhythm whose movements have been, as it were, inspired

by water and fire, and which surrounds Venus with a cheerful excitement. In

another work of the same title (the one in the Stephen Higgins collection),

painted two years later, in 1912, the body of Venus, still enclosed in its shell

like a beautiful fruit of flesh in its pearly skin, rises in a vertical line which is

accentuated by the elongated shape of the canvas, thus giving the impression

of a thrust toward the sky pushing up from the bottom of the sea. Its colors

are still more joyful, and an ethereal lightness is imparted to it by the somewhat

sifted lighting of the central motif, in which pink predominates.

In the same year, Redon executed one of his most beautiful pastels, mo-

deled on a shell that Ary Leblond had brought him from the Seychelles. The

shell (this time without Venus) and its model are still in the apartment

on the Avenue de Wagram in Paris where he settled in 1905 and where his

son Ari still lives amid the souvenirs of his father which he has piously

preserved. Here again the relationship between the object depicted and its back-

ground, the precise draftsmanship of the one and the misty coloring of the

other, the feeling of delicacy and the mystery it emits, leave us incapable of

explaining this secret power that Redon possessed of translating the simplest

things into a genuine poetic language, but they convince us that the technique

had never before been carried so far. He had also used it between 1905 and

1910 (it has not been possible to ascertain the exact date) for a work which,

it is true, remained isolated, but which nevertheless shows how far Redon had

advanced in the search for a style of expression which no one had as yet ex-

plored. This work. Plays of colors, is, as its title modestly proclaims, a pastel in

which, by the juxtaposition of forms difficult to identify with objects, color is

taken as the subject of the composition. A decision so daring for that period

should not greatly surprise us in this painter; as we have seen in his charcoal

drawings, many of his canvases display an area of abstract forms that parti-

cipate in the indeterminate nature of his vision. Such is the case in The red sphinx

68

The Dream idetail;, around 1912 Oil Madame L. Jaggli-Hahnloser Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland

69

I

ii

Eve, 1904 Oil, 24" X 18' Jacques Dubourg Collection, Paris

^x^

-^^^^

•t»4.*v »^6<^.

Monk Reading (or Alsace), 1905-1909 Oil, 25/2" X 21" Kunstmuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland

The Japanese Warrior Vase, 1905-1908 Pastel, 86/4 X 28/4

Private Collection. Paris

Large Bouquet of Field Flowers^ around 1912 Pastel, 32^" X 24"

Professor Hans R. Hahnloser Collection. Bern

t

The Shell, 1912 Pastel, 19" X 22'

Ari Redon Collection, Paris

Woman amid Flowers, 1909-1910 Pastel, 26" X 22" r^

Mrs. H. Harris Jonas Collection, New York

74i

The Battle of the Centaurs, around 1912 Oil. 20" X 25/2"


^^^^^^^^^^^r *'^^^l«Hft^ <^^^^^^l

w m

I^^^^^^Htr

B _^

Red Boat with Sun, undated Oil

Private Collection, The Netherlands

77

The Dream, around 1912 Oil, 28/4 " X 21^"Madame L. Jaggli-Hahnloser Collection, Wintherthur, Switzerland

>^<a > ."i

Saint Sebastian, 1910 Watercolor, 10" X 7^4" Musee des Beaux-Arts, Basel

Red Ball, 1910 Oil, 8/2" X 6>4" Private Collection

in the Hans R. Hahnloser collection, where color seems to be captured in the mo-ment of a metamorphosis that is transforming it into mist, a flower, or a butterfly.

For Redon, flowers were always a subject for study as well as an object

of the dream. They traverse his work with an almost obsessive persistence. Some-

times they loom out of the depths of the sky, an oneiric garden in which the

painter's mind wanders in pursuit of fleeting delights, as in The dream, in the

collection of Mme. Jaggli-Hahnloser. The incorporeal profile of a woman with

closed eyes, like an image of her own dream, is borne away among clouds,

one of which has opened out into a sudden burst of flowers. Often, however,

these flowers appear in simple bouquets arranged in a vase, which in no waydetracts from their character as a miraculous apparition nor from the kind of

human spirituality which seems to inhabit their plant form. Redon observed

them in nature ; sometimes he invented them, breathing into them a more intel-

ligent life. Before certain of these paintings - for example, the Bouquet of anem-

ones in the Petit Palais - we feel in fact that we are being watched by each

flower; every one of them seems mutely to experience a desire to answer our

question, to tell us an extraordinary secret, to reveal to us the significance con-

cealed in the depths of its red or violet color.

Redon was not always aware of the imaginary form with which he en-

dowed his flowers. One day one of his friends, Mme. Hedy Hahnloser, called his

attention to the fact that one of his bouquets included flowers that did not exist

in nature. He seemed surprised by this, and answered, « I didn't invent them -

1

see them that way. »

The Bouquet of anemones is a pastel with a square shape, i.e., one which

is unusual in the history of painting. However, it is not exceptional for Redon.

We discover it again in another pastel, the Sea horses in an undersea landscape

(New Gallery, New York), in The Engraver (Petit Palais), and in a canvas in the

collection of Hans R. Hahnloser, the Feminine profile, inscribed in a shell, an evo-

cation of Mme. Redon, whose portrait the artist frequently did. For Redon was

also a portraitist with a sensitivity that reflects the penetrating and, so to speak,

analytical manner in which he was able to examine a face. The portraits of Jeanne

Chaine (Basel Museum), Violette Heyman (Cleveland Museum), and Marie

Botkin (Ari Redon collection), and that of Gauguin (Musee des Impression-

nistes), which he painted from memory, reveal with what simplicity Redon

achieved those nuances of expression that simultaneously reveal and conceal the

model's thought. An extreme modesty, the note of a peaceful gravity, are for

him essential elements of seduction in a woman, whose grace is in his eyes

inseparable from a certain mystery. Thus he painted the admirable Eve of the

Jacques Dubourg collection, a very little known work in which the reveries of

a spirit in search of the feminine ideal are epitomized.

81

A Woman near a Tree, around 1894 Charcoal, 2O/2" X 74/2'


A constantly growing body of work

The taste for simplicity, intellectual honesty, a constantly attentive charm,a modesty which, however, was not an unawareness of his personality, thefeeling of moderation in all things, marked the life of Odilon Redon with ahuman quality appreciated by a his friends. We find the echo of this quality

in the pages of the book A Soi-meme, to which he consigned memories of his

childhood and reflections on life and on his own art and that of others. Al-

though he was sometimes astonished by the lack of understanding his worksencountered, he felt neither bitterness nor anger. A wisdom which was the

fruit of reflection, and the determination to accomplish his work in accordancewith the goal he had set for himself ruled out any idea of revolt. This unobtru-

siveness and lack of interest in the excitement and intrigues of life in Paris did

not prevent him from gradually compelling recognition from a public which,it is true, was at first rather small, nor from attracting the attention of dealers

and collectors.

Between 1889 and 1906, Durand-Ruel in Paris often exhibited his works.They could again be seen in Brussels in 1890, at the Salon des XX, and for

the first time at The Hague in 1894. Ambroise Vollard in turn welcomed himto his gallery in 1898 and 1901, purchasing 102 charcoal drawings which are nowdispersed in private collections. In 1904 an entire room was devoted to Redonat the Salon d'Automne. In the same year. The closed eyes was hung in the

Musee du Luxembourg in Paris. In 1908, fifty-two of his works were exhibited

at the Galerie Druet, and in 1913 he participated in an exhibition in Zurich

and in the Armory Show in the United States. Also in 1913, Andre Mellerio

published the catalogue of his engravings and lithographs.

Major patrons in turn appeared and demonstrated a touching fidelity to

Redon. In 1900 he was commissioned to decorate the dining hall of the Chateau

de Domecy in Burgundy ; for this project he executed eighteen panels covering

an area of 355 square feet. The following year he decorated the salon of Mme.Ernest Chausson. In 1903 he painted screens for Princess Cystria and for Olivier

Sainsere. Andre Bonger, who began to purchase his paintings in 1892, and Gustave

Fayet, for v/hom he decorated the library at Fontfroide in 1910, were among his

first collectors. At Fontfroide (Aude), some seven miles from Narbonne, in a

former Cistercian abbey which Gustave Fayet had purchased in 1908, the painter

chose Night and Day as the themes of the two principal frescoes, each of which

occupies an area 2I/2 feet long by 6/2 feet high, and in which he retraced a

kind of synthesis of the major stages in his own development.

Of all the private collections now including works by Redon, that of

Mme. Bonger, at Almen in Holland, is the largest. It consists of seventy-eight

:

seventeen paintings, eleven pastels, three panels done in tempera (Flowering

83

tree, Red tree, Buddha), one screen, twenty-one drawings, twenty-four litho-

graphs, and one stained-glass window. The artist's favorite themes are

represented here for the period ranging from 1864 to 1908, from his first studies

of flowers down to those compositions in which, as the painter of an imaginaryworld and a spiritualized humanity, he was most profoundly himself : Pegasus,

Ophelia, Boat with holy woman, and so on. It also includes a still life of 1901,

Lemon and pimento, which shows us a little-known aspect of his work.Another Redon collection, containing several of his most beautiful works,

is the one which Mme. Hedy Hahnloser - who was a great friend of Bonnard,Vuillard, Matisse, and Vallotton - began to build up, with very knowledgeable

taste, in 1912. This now belongs to her daughter, Mme. Lisa Jaggli-Hahnloser, in

Winterthur, and her son, Professor Hans R. Hahnloser, in Bern. Their gracious

homes in these two cities are genuine miniature museums, invaluable for the

knowledge of the painting of the closing years of the nineteenth and beginning

of the twentieth centuries.

Whereas the Franco-Prussian War had been for Redon an experience

that was translated into a fecund awakening of his own creative powers, the

war of 1914 was above all a great torment. In the continual state of anxiety in

which he had been left by the departure of his son Ari for the front, it seemed

to him that all happiness had come to an end forever. The time of friendly

gatherings in which Bonnard, Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Emile Bernard, Andre

Gide, Paul Valery, Arthur Fontaine, Henri Kapferer, and so many others assem-

bled at his home already belonged to a distant past which in effect was never

again to come to life. In 1916, as the result of a chill, Redon was obliged to take

to his bed, and he never got up again. He died on July 6, in his Paris apartment,

at the age of seventy-six.

In his last years, despite the diminution of his powers and the anguished

days of the war, the old painter had never abandoned his work. In 1914 he had

made his last trip to Holland, where he had many friends. His last work, a

Profile of the Virgin, in which the spiritual vision was tinged with melancholy,

dates from 1916.

A few months after his death, a Russian collector, Jacques Zoubaloff,

came to see Mme. Redon with the desire of becoming the owner of a work by

the painter, for whom he had a deep admiration. He purchased the large pastel

of The Birth of Venus, carried it away under his arm, hailed a taxi, and went

straight to the Petit Palais to donate his acquisition. He often returned thereafter,

and each time did the same thing with his purchases - pastel, watercolors, and

drawings - thus building up in the Petit Palais the most remarkable collection

of Redon works to be seen in Paris. « His works are too beautiful for me to

want to keep them for myself, » he explained.

84

OtffLt^ /V ?^ tl^*

Inclined Female Head, around 1910 Watercolor, 8" X 6/2" Arii Redon Collection, Paris

Bouquet of Anemones, after 1912 Pastel, 24/2" X 241/2"

Petit Palais Museum, Paris

Vase of Fuowers, around 1914 Pastel, 29/2" X 2354" ^Petit Palais Museum, Paris

86

Birth of Venus, around 1910 Pastel, 32^" X 25J4" Petit Palais Museum, Paris

Since then the fame of Odilon Redon has grown constantly and the mostunrecognized aspects of his work have gradually been revealed in major exhi-

bitions. Even today, however, it is not easy to acquire an extensive knowledge of

his work. Dispersed throughout the world in numerous museums and private

collections, the approximately two thousand works which he left in large part

evade the most diligent organizers of retrospectives. The retrospective offered

in Paris in 1956 at the Musee de I'Orangerie assembled only 213 works. And, while

almost all his lithographs and engravings (Mellerio catalogued 206) are pre-

served in the Print Department of the National Library, few of his charcoal

drawings are in public collections. (For a long time the Print Department of

the Louvre Museum owned only one, but recent acquisitions permitted it to

exhibit five in 1968 at the exhibition of the « Masters of black-and-white in the

nineteenth century, from Prud'hon to Redon. ») But it is precisely in these

charcoal drawings, in the always somewhat latent anxiety of their shadwy areas,

sometimes clarified by a tragic accent, that we penetrate most deeply into the

implication and virtualities of a body of work of which our understanding would

remain incomplete if we were able to know only the creations that appeared

in the sunlight of color.

The same is true to a certain extent of Seurat, whose conte crayon

drawings are indispensable for a knowledge of the two aspects of his personality.

In Seurat 's work, however, and even though the crayon technique did not lend

itself to the Neo-Impressionist methods of his painting, the graphic spirit remained

very close to the latter, and the themes were the same. In Redon's work, on the

other hand, the period which we could call « diurnal » in order to contrast it

with the « nocturnal » period in fact stands opposed to the latter not only by

the methods of realization but also by a complete renewal of the themes and

their spiritual atmosphere.

The place that Redon's work has taken in the history of painting today

seems to us all the more important in that it stands outside the great tributary

movements of a theory or a school. In this way it affirms itself in all the power

of its singularity. Though Redon sometimes flirted with the Symbolist ideology,

and though he can be reproached, in his weakest compositions, with lingering

over an esthetic that was an offshoot of that of the Pre-Raphaelites, he discovered

is true originality elsewhere. That originality resides in the supreme liberty

with which he translated into a single language and on to a single canvas

both that which nature was able to offer him and also every invented form

whose sources he ignored; it appeared before his gaze like the reflection of

an interior scene whose elusive motifs he alone was capable of capturing.

In this way Redon, the precursor of the subjectivism of modern painting,

was the painter of that dual reality that permitted him to attain the goal which

89

Paul Klee set himself in a different manner when he wished « to render a secret

vision visible » while endowing visible objects with a secret depth.

Odilon Redon captured this silent universe which oscillates between

night and day, between anguish and ecstasy, with its train of monstrous and

divine beings, its improbable flora and fauna, its scenes in which the familiar

stands side by side with the wondrous, this universe of the relative and the

inexpressible that appears only by chance in our dreams and daydreams, in all

its irrational truth, contributing to art a new expression of poetic thought.

Jean Selz

Sunset, undated Oil, 12' X 1734 Private Collection

BIOGRAPHY

1840. Odilon Redon, son of Bertrand Redonand Marie-Odile Guerin, is born on April

20 in Bordeaux. His childhood is spentat Peyrelebade (Gironde).

1855. Begins to study drawing with Stanislas

Gorin.

1862. First charcoal drawings and paintings.

1863. Becomes friends with the botanist Ar-

mand Clavaud and with Rodolphe Bres-

din. Nonmatriculated student in Ge-

rome's studio and the ficole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

1867. Exhibits an etching {The Ford, 1865) at

the Salon du Palais des Champs-Elysees.

1870-71. Participates as an ordinary soldier in

the battles on the Loire. Settles in Paris

after the war.

1874. Death of his father.

1875. Works in Barbizon and Brittany.

1878. First trip to Holland. First lithographs.

1879. Works in Brittany. Pubhshes his first

lithographic album, In the dream.

1880. On May 1, marries Camille Falte, a

half-sister of Juliette Dodu. First pastels.

1881. First exhibition of charcoal drawings at

La Vie Moderne in Paris.

1882. Exhibits charcoal drawings, lithographs,

and etchings in the exhibition room of

the Parisian newspaper Le Gaulois.

1883. Works in Brittany.

1884. Exhibits at the first Salon des Indepen-

dants, where he will exhibit again in

1886 and 1887. Becomes president of

the Salon.

1885. Exhibits a lithograph at the Salon des

Artistes Fran^ais.

1886. Birth and death of his son Jean. First

participation in the Salon des XX in

Brussels. Exhibits at the eighth and last

Salon des Impressionnistes.

1888. Spends the sumraer at Samois.

1889. Birth of his son Ari. Spends the summerat Samois. Participates in the first exhi-

bition of painters-engravers et Durand-Ruel in Paris, where he will exhibit everyyear until 1893.

1890. Goes to Brussels in February with Mal-

larme, for the second exhibition of the

Salon des XX, in which he participates.

1891. Exhibits at the General Exhibition of

Lithography in the Ecole des Beaux-Artsat Paris.

1894. Private exhibition in March-April at the

Durand-Ruel Gallerj'. Exhibition at the

Haagsche Kunstkring in Holland (May-June).

1895. Trip to London in October.

1897. Sale of Peyrelebade.

1898. Exhibits in Ambroise Vollard's gallery

in Paris. Spends the summer at Saint-

Georges-de-Didonne, near Royan, to whichhe will return every year for about ten

years.

1899. Exhibition of young painters at Durand-Ruel Gallery, in honor of Redon. Publi-

cation by Vollard of his latest lithograph-

ic album. The Apocalypse of Saint John.

1900. Participates in the Centennial of FrenchArt (Universal Exposition of Paris). Ex-

hibits at Durand-Ruel. Trip to Italy with

Robert de Domecy. Maurice Denis paints

Homage to Cezanne, in which appear

among others Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard,

Roussel, and Serusier (Musee National

d'Art Moderne, Paris). Exhibits in Cra-

cow.

1901. Exhibits at Vollard's gallery. Decorates

the dining hall of the Chateau de Dome-cy, in Burgundy, and the salon of Mme.Ernest Chausson in Paris. Participates

in the exhibition organized by Gustave

Fayet at the Societe des Beaux-Arts of

Beziers.

1903. Redon is awarded the Legion of Honor.

Exhibits at Durand-Ruel.

1904. The Salon d'Automne includes a RedonRoom with sixty-two works. The Museedu Luxembourg in Paris acquires Theclosed eyes.

9J

1905. Exhibits ten works at the Salon d'Au-

tomne.

1906. Exhibits at Durand-Ruel. Sends six worksto the Salon d'Automne.

1907. Odilon Redon sale at the Hotel Drouot.

Trip to Switzerland. Exhibits three worksat the Salon d'Automne.

1908. Trip to Switzerland. First tapestry car-

toons for the Gobelins. Exhibits at the

Galerie Druet in Paris.

1909. Settles in Bievre ( Seine-et-Oise ) for the

summer.

1910. Decorates the library of the Abbey of

Fontfroide (Aude). In London, partici-

pates in the exhibition of « Manet andPost-Impressionism » at the Grafton Gal-

lery.

1912. Participates in the Centennial of FrenchArt at Saint Petersburg.

1913. Submits several works to the Exhibition

of French Art at the Kunsthaus in Zu-

rich. The International Exhibition of

Modern Art (Armory Show) in NewYork, Chicago, and Boston includes a

Redon Room (40 works).

1914. Exhibits at the Alfred Flechtheim Gal-

lery in Diisseldorf. Trip to Holland.

1916. Redon dies on Juh 6 in Paris. Is buried

in the cemcterv at Bievre.

1919. Redon exhibition at the Kunstmuseumin Winterthur.

1920. Redon retrospective (214 works) at the

Galerie Barbazanges, Paris.


Galerie Druet, Paris.

1926. Redon retrospective at the Musee desArts Decoratifs, Paris.

1934. Redon exhibition at the Petit Palais.

Paris.

1952. Redon exhibition (drawings and litho-

graphs) at the Museum of Modern Art,

New York.


Musee de I'Orangerie, Paris.


Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.


Kunsthalle, Bern.

1959. Redon exhibition at the Mathieson Gal-

lery, London.

1961. Redon exhibition at the Museum of Mod-ern Art, New York.

1962. Redon exhibition at the Art Institute of

Chicago.

Redon exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

1963. Redon exhibition at the Galerie Bern-

heim-Jeune, Paris.

1966. Redon exhibition (lithographs) at the

Galerie Vallotton, Lausanne.

1967. Redon exhibition at The Hague Museum.Redon exhibition at the Krugier Gal-

leries, Geneva and New York.

1968. Redon exhibition at the Kunsthalle, Bern.

1969. Redon exhibition (drawings, etchings,

lithographs) at the Galerie Le Bateau-

Lavoir, Paris.

ODILON REDON'S WRITINGS

1868. Lc Salon de 1868. Article in La Girunde,

Bordeaux.

1869. Rudolphe Bresdin. Article in La Gironde,

Bordeaux.

1894. Lett re a Edrjiond Picard. Published underthe title « Confidences d'artiste » in I'Art

Moderne, 34, Brussels.

1908. Rodolphe Bresdin. 1822-1885. Preface for

the Bresdin retrospective at the Salon

d'Automne, Paris.

1922. A Soi-Meme. Journal 1867-1915. Ed. Flou-

ry, Paris, 1922. Ed Jose Corti, Paris, 1961.

1923. Lettres d'Odilon Redon. 1878-1916. Prefa-

ce by M.-A. Leblond. Ed G. van Oest,

Parj^s and Brussels.

1926. Lettres a Emile Bernard. La Renovation

esthctique, Tonnerre.

92

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1891. Destrees, Jules: L'CEuvre lithographique

d'Odilon Redon. Ed. Deman, Brussels.

1913. Mellerio Andre: Odilon Redon. Society

for the Study of French Engraving, Paris.

1913. Pach, Walter: Odilon Redon, New York.

1913. L'CEuvre graphique d'Odilon Redon. 2

vols. Artz and De Bois, editors. La Haye.

1923. Mellerio Andre: Odilon Redon, peintre,

dessinateur et graveur. Ed. Floury, Paris.

1925. Roger-Marx, Claude: Odilon Redon. No.

21, « Les Peintres frangais nouveaux »

series, N.R.F. Paris.

1929. Fegdal, Charles: Odilon Redon. Ed. Rie-

der, Paris.

19.50. Roger-Marx, Claude: Redon. Fusains(Charcoals). « Plastique » series. Ed.Braun, Paris.

1955. Sandstrom, Sven: Le monde imaginaire

d'Odilon Redon. Ed. Gleerup, Lund.

1956. Bacou, Roseline: Odilon Redon. 2 vols.

Ed. Pierre Cailler, Geneva.

1960. Lettres a Odilon Redon (from Gauguin,

Gide, Huysmans, Jammes, Mallarme,etc.). Ed. Jose Corti, Paris.

1964. Selz, Jean: Odilon Redon reveille. In

Le dire et le faire. Ed. du Mercure deFrance, Paris.

1964. Berger, Klaus. Odilon Redon. Ed. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne.

1968. Redon. Text by R. Negri and Ch. de

Bellescize. « Chefs-d'oeuvre de I'Art » se-

ries. Ed. Hachette, Paris.

1970. Odilon Redon a I'Abbaye de Font-froide.

Text by Roseline Bacou and Claude Ro-

ger-Marx. « Chefs-d'oeuvre de I'Art » se-

ries. Ed. Hachette - Fabbri - Skira, Paris,

Milan. Geneva.

93

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94

ILLUSTRATIONS

Arab Musician, The 42

Battle of the Centaurs, The 76

Birth of Venus 88

Bouquet of Anemones 86

Breton Port 5

Buddha 19

CHffs at VaHeres, The 12

Closed Eyes 17

Cyclops 45

Dream, The 63

Dream, The 78

Dream (detail). The 69

Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Movestoward the Infinite, The 22

Eye with Poppy 39

Eve 70

Flight 7

Flight into Egypt, The 53

Flower with a Child's Head .... 35

Flowers on Blank Ground 64

Gambler, The 58

Gnome, The 14

Green Death 46

Homage to Gauguin 41

Horse 60

House at Peyrelebade 43

Inclined Female Head 85

Intuition 33

Japanese Warrior Vase 72

Jeanne Chaine 55

Large Bouquet of Field flowers ... 73

Lemon and the Pepper 44

Madness 32

Man with Serpent 47

Martyr's Head 31

Mask Tolls the Knell, A 15

Meditation 20Monk Reading 71

Orpheus 54

Phaethon's Chariot 61

Portrait of Ari 48Portrait of Ari as a Child 49Portrait of Madame Redon 11

Portrait of Madame Redon Embroide-ring 18

Portrait of Madame Redon with a Yel-low Scarf 50

Portrait of Marie Botkin 51

Portrait of Odilon Redon by Vuillard 3

Portrait of Pierre Bonnard 65Prisoner 59Profile of Light 38

Raven, The 23Reader, The 66Red Ball 80Red Boat, The 25

Red Boat with Sun 77Red Bush 28Red Sphinx, The 63

Roger and Angelique 56

Rose in a Vase 9

Sacred Heart 52

Saint Sebastian 79

Self-Portrait 10

Self-Portrait 16

Shell, The 74

Shulamite, The 27

Smiling Spider, The 30

Suit of Armor 36

Sunset 90

There Was Perhaps a Preliminary VisionTested in the Flower 34

Torch, The 67

Vase of Flowers 87

Wall Opens and a Death's Head Appears 37

Woman amid Flowers 75

Woman near a Tree, A 82

95

The Q.L.P. Art Series

This collection offers to the public a series of mono-graphs on the great masters of modern art. Each \ol-

ume - the work of the most qualified specialists -

is illustrated by fifty-three color plates, and twentyin black and white. The clear and precise texts,

backed by thorough scholarship, cover the most re-

cent investigations into the artist and his work, andinclude a chronology and an up-to-date bibliography.

The illustrations, which have been reproduced with

extreme care, were chosen after a rigorous process

of selection from the artist's entire oeuvre, and offer

a complete presentation of the artist's concerns andtechniques.

Already published:

VAN GOGHby Rene Huyghe, member of the Academie Fran(aise

RENOIRby Bruno F. Schneider

GAUGUINby Rene Huyghe, member of the Academie Fran(aise

TOULOUSE-LAUTRECby Edguard Julien

DEGASby Eduard Hlttinger

PICASSOby Gaston Diehl

CEZANNEby Yvon Taillant)ier

RAOUL DUFYby Raymont) Cogniat

MANETby Robert Rey

VLAMINCKby Jean Selz

MONETby Yvon Taillandier

D E R A I

N

by Gaston Diehl

MATISSEby Jean Selz

OUDOTby Daniel Vouga

CHAGALLby Raymond Cogniat

RODINby Yvon Taillandier

COROTby Yvon Taillandier

BONNARDby Raymond Cogniat

PASCINby Gaston Diehl

VAN DONGENby Gaston Diehl

PICASSOthe Blue and Rose Periods

by Denys Chevalier

MODIGLIANIby Gaston Diehl

M A I L L O Lby Denys Chevalier

BRAQUEby Raymond Cogniat

REDONby Jean Selz

CROWN PUBLISHERS, Inc.419 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10016

SIB

/

OMtOM Ket>ON

BY JEAN SELZ

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Odilon Redon (Art Painting eBook)

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